Tonight’s open mic was good, except they had to cut the last three people off the list because it was running over time.  All three of the last comics were women too, which meant the show ended up being 15+ men and 2 women.  One of the women who got cut is one of my favourite comics in Vic too, so it sucks that she didn’t get the stage time.

The ‘Cake in Nova Scotia’ set is really starting to come together.  It got decent laughs last night and tonight.  I don’t know if it’s good yet, but people are laughing where they’re supposed to, and I’ve been smoothing out the ‘maybe they’ll laugh?’ moments so that they’re predictable.  The biggest laugh in the whole set isn’t where I expect it to be, but it’s consistent, so I’ll move it to the end for next week and see what happens.

I’m still having trouble memorizing my set.  I don’t know if it’s just because I keep tweaking and changing things, but I feel completely unconfident going up on stage without a set list, and when I’ve got a set list I tend to lean on it way too hard.  Maybe it’s time to go up without a set list and see how badly I bomb.

For the last few months, I’ve been doing standup comedy.  Twice a week I go to a bar, have someone mis-pronounce my name, and then face the gauntlet of public speaking engagements.  It’s so much harder than conference speaking – if you sponsor the conference, they’ll often learn how to pronounce your name correctly.

Photo Credit: Lenora Ribeiro

My brain is lighting up in a way that it hasn’t in years.  For the first dozen or so open mic’s, it was absolutely terrifying.  Now I’m finding that I’m able to focus more on making a crowd laugh, rather than just the heart palpitations and the shooting pain up and down my arm.  I’m not saying I’m making them laugh often, but it’s definitely more than it was three months ago.  It’s more than it was last month.  And there’s something satisfying in that.

Tonight I was at Logan’s, a local dive bar best known for being infamous.  It’s such a hit or miss stage.  Sometimes you get a room full of people that came to make a hangover together, and sometimes you just get a room full of people who… I dunno, their therapists tell them they should leave the house once a week.

I don’t know if I’m gonna start posting about this too much – my last post from two years ago was really working, and I’m nervous to screw it up – but I think Alexei is sick of hearing me rant about all the stuff I’m learning, so we’ll see what happens.

This evening’s performance was accompanied by the sound of ‘really drunk girl all the way across the room’.  You probably won’t be surprised to hear that she heckled loudly for most of the night.  If she watches TV the same way she watches comedy, this woman could drown out a FOX News anchor.

I do feel oddly comforted though.  I just listened to a recording of my set, and I was the first guy in a while that she didn’t yell “NOT FUNNY” or “NEXT” towards.  It’s possible she just figured that useful feedback would be wasted on me anyhow.

The crowd was not feeling it tonight.  And I let it spook me.  You can hear it on the recording, I’m not moving fluidly between bits, I’m getting a smaller laugh than normal (or no laugh in a couple spots), and then there’s this awkward pause while I try to remember if I forgot to say the punchline.

But that’s a time thing.  We’ll get there.

(I had a good set yesterday.)

I feel like I spent the last year saying “We’re going to be shipping soon.”

Last night, around 7:30, I pressed the “Submit for Review” button on Codeless 1.0.  And now here’s the part I hate.  The waiting.

This morning it went into review.  Everybody cross your fingers.  We’re (hopefully!) about to send this thing out into the world and see how many people want to be friends.

Every so often, I’m at my desk working and I glance to the left.  There’s a large window there. It looks down Bastion Square, past the Maritime Museum, and to Victoria’s inner harbour.

This is why I’m grinning right now.

I just got back from a couple of weeks in Peru.  Attending my sister-in-law’s wedding, checking out Lima, marvelling at Machu Picchu, and spending a couple days in the amazon.

Over the past few days, I’ve gotten asked how long we’ve been building Codeless a few times.  I thought I’d write it down somewhere.

I’ve always liked punching above my weight. When I was thinking about what project I wanted to pour myself into next, Codeless appealed to me. An app where you build apps – that seems more like something an Apple or an Adobe should do. Which made it the perfect project for me and my tiny development team.

I started writing Codeless in May 2015. For the first year-and-half it was strictly a ‘nights and weekends’ project. Nobody else on my team even knew I was working on it. It came out of a long period of reflection I did – how could we make the development process smoother?

I actually built three full prototypes of the software before showing it off to anyone but my husband. All three were woefully incomplete by the current standards of Codeless. They were crashy, they lacked actions, there was no scripting at all. Swift export didn’t even exist. But they were enough to convince me that it was time to start spending real money and time developing an app where you build apps. This was a way to smooth development.

When I finally showed it to my team, it was time to ditch my previous work and start fresh with the knowledge I’d gained from those prototypes.

We were able to move fast. We took the last prototype and bought coffee for developers, designers, and entrepreneurs here in Victoria. The consensus was that yeah, they were interested in apps, but yeah, they also wanted a faster way to build. Time and money are crucial when you’re building something new, and everybody knew that apps were expensive in both ways.

In the shop, Adam and Brendan worked hard building up the app’s architecture. Owen came by for the summer and helped flesh out the business plan. Jen figured out the voice of the product and figured out how to speak about it. I pitched in where I could, mostly building out features and making sure we stayed true to the vision.

I also started dogfooding it as often as possible. Building out concepts for prospective clients and showing them how their app would feel if they went with Whole Punk. Creating silly little apps (like my ‘dog quotes’ app) and serious ones too (a mobile app to talk to our bug tracker, apps to track our validation efforts).

By December of 2017, we were ready to go into beta. Our small beta list looked at the product, and expressed that it was good – but could it do more? Could they build whole apps, just on the iPad? So we did what any seriously normal people would do. We wrote a scripting language and a standard library and added it in.

Their brings us to now. Last Thursday we stood up in front of the Victoria Web and App Developers meetup and demoed Codeless to a room for the first time. The feedback we got was fantastic.

One person told us that he was a QA guy, but he could see himself building out apps with this – he already had an idea about something he wanted to build. Another told us that he thought a tool we’ve built in for hookup up JSON was super slick. One woman wanted to know how it worked on a mini – and let us know that she’d be checking that out herself!

We’re still not at the finish line. To be honest, I don’t even think we’re at the start yet. But we’ve trained for this marathon and we’re ready to run it.

How you can get involved: Sign up for the beta and help us test it out. Follow us on Twitter. Tell your friends. And when we launch Codeless, please subscribe.

(This has been in my drafts folder for a while, but today I saw this article on Techcrunch and I had to post it.  If you want to talk or argue about this idea, you can find me on Twitter @warwick or email me at bob@wholepunk.com.)

I love bookstores.  The smell of ink and paper.  The tall wooden shelves.  The slow walk that browsers take on while they survey subjects I never knew existed.

I come from a print family – my grandparents and parents owned print shops.  Bookstores always remind me a little of home.  So I’m in a position to tell you – we print books for the bookstore… but we print everything else too.

We print business cards, memo pads and calendars.  We print college course catalogs,  business forms, and direct mail advertising.  And no sane bookstore would stock any of it.

But it’s important that it gets printed.  Print allows for so many useful things, and almost none of them have any place in a bookstore.

I’ve taken a different course from my family, but really it’s not that different.  I don’t own a print shop.  I own an app shop.  From a little office in the downtown of Victoria, BC, my team and I create software for your phone.

I believe that there are apps that should be in the store.  Apps that broadly apply to a mass audience, whether you’re in Victoria or New York.  I’ve built a business helping to deliver those.  But I also believe that there are many more apps that are the equivalent of business cards, memo pads, and calendars.  They’re useful, but useful for maybe a hundred people.  I call them small circle apps.

*  *  * 

There are plenty of reasons why you might want an app for a small audience.

I prototyped an app for my wedding last summer.  Sure, there are wedding apps out there, but I would have been stuck using their design and their decisions when I wanted to create something that was uniquely special for our wedding day.  We ended up not using it, because I had absolutely no faith that we could get it past review.  Most things don’t belong in a bookstore.

I have restaurants all around my city that would love to let you order via their app.  I’m a regular at several of these kinds of restaurants, but they wouldn’t be able to get an app on my home screen either.  They’re just too small, and those apps aren’t useful unless you’re in the small circle of people who live near the restaurant – so the restaurants are stuck going through aggregators instead.

Whether it’s my real-estate agents ‘app business card’, or my kid’s soccer team schedule app, or my apartment building’s ‘announcement’ app – most things just don’t belong in a bookstore.

*  *  * 

The obvious retort is that I can just load up all this stuff in my web browser.  I can Google my real estate agent, and I can sign up for email blasts from my apartment building.  But the mobile web still sucks after a decade of working hard on it.  I want beautiful and smooth UIs, I want maps that pinch to zoom correctly, and I want notifications that show up on my lock screen instead of my email.

I can look up Facebook on Safari too.  Or Yelp!  Or Instagram.  But we don’t deny that those experiences are better as apps.  Apple has put an incredible amount of effort into making sure that apps on iOS are incredible to use.  Small circle apps will be better experiences than their equivalent websites too.

But they still don’t belong in the App Store.  The App Store should be a place that we go to find the apps that have broad appeal.  It should be curated.  It should be browsable.  It should be a bookstore.

*  *  * 

So how the hell do we get small circle apps if they shouldn’t be in the store?  Well, luckily Apple has already build all the mechanisms we need.

 The only difference between a small circle app and an app in the store is how it’s indexed.  Small circle apps wouldn’t show up on any of the browsing lists for the store.  They wouldn’t get featured.  They wouldn’t show up in search.  The only way to find a small circle app would be to already have a direct link.

And once you’ve got that link?  I can link directly to an app in the App Store today.  The store screen would load right up with screenshots and reviews and a download button.

People who want those apps would be able to get the link easily.  It could be sent to them via email, or it could show up on websites using Smart Banners, or people could scan a QR code with iOS 11’s built in scanner.  If we had shipped our wedding app as a small circle app, I can guarantee that our invitations would have had an App Store link on them.

And now, with just that little change, suddenly iOS apps aren’t limited to what you can find in the bookstore.  You can download an app for your neighbourhood, an app for your favourite restaurant, apps for your kids classroom, and an app for your church.

All without cluttering up my experience of the app store.  And I don’t have to clutter yours.  When we do want to search for our new social networking app or a cool game, we don’t need to wade through the garbage.

*  *  *

Let’s say that your name is Tim Cook.  You’ve been reading this entry, and you’re getting excited.  It turns out that there might be a way to have a beautiful bookstore and your kids soccer schedule, all on the same printing press.  What needs to happen next?

1. Create a ‘small circle apps’ piece of metadata in iTunes Connect.  Developers would opt-in.
2. Instruct reviewers that small circle apps don’t need to comply with App Store Review Guidelines 4.2 (and possibly 4.3)
3. Update the App Store servers to avoid showing small circle apps in search or browse views.
4. Tell the world.  We’ll be pretty excited.

 I’ve done a lot of thinking about small circle apps.  I feel like I have to admit – I’ve got an ulterior motive.  For the past couple of years, my dev team has been working on Codeless, which is an iPad app to build apps for the iPhone.  It generates real code, and it’s meant to create beautiful and complex apps.  The kind of apps that should be in the bookstore.

But you could use it to make small circle apps too.  And I wouldn’t mind it at all, as long as it didn’t clutter the store.

Not everything belongs in the bookstore.  But that doesn’t mean we stop printing the pamphlets, the ads, the notepads, or the business cards.  Apps are powerful and full-featured experiences.  Apple can make them even better.